Midnight Heist

"Casing the joint", as they say.

Archie's persepctive

17

NOV/14

We get introduced to a guy. He’s got a group together, so right away I assume this job is dangerous. You don’t need 8 wraiths for a simple job, right? It’s the small clues that you look for, like when transcribing ancient texts, or stealing.

Stealing. I don’t like it, but there it is. First you were a brave explorer, Archie, uncovering clues to save the world from what? Evil carrot monsters? Phalluses, I think. And now, you’re a ghost and a thief among killers and thieves? Archie, remember when you realized your companions on the excavation had died? Why do you project yourself into this death state? Tell me more. There’s an item being transferred from one group to another, and one or both of the groups is a threat somehow (thus we need 8 of us) and the item is important somehow. These somehows we don’t know yet. But the busses go to the drop point, in a gentrified part of Atlanta, so we ride.

It’s a school. There’s artifacts there. In crates, so I can’t see all of them, but they’re there. Fascinating items, really, although my partners-in-crime are disinterested. It’s all newer, not pre-Columbian at all, but no less interesting. And it’s all relevant to what we’re doing here. It’s about superstitions, and what’s more basic a superstition than ghosts? Unless you’re a ghost. Then it’s just a fact. Again with artifacts. You have an obsession that has entered into your psychoses. The answers you seek are not in this dream state, Archie, not in those crates you imagine. Come to the world again, Archie, and I will show you the asnwers.

I digress. The building smalls of smoke and water, but this effect fades over time. Until late afternoon, when it returns, with a vengeance. The building burns every day, at the same time. This is when the exchange is most likely, we think, because we can grasp simple clues.

The Nurses come back. They have the electroshock machine. I’m alive again. I’m still in the Sanitarium. I’ve been naughty. I’m hallucinating again. Ghosts. Criminals. I was hero, now a thief. The delusions never stop. The treatments will fix me. I don’t want the treatments. The nurse. She takes me away. It’s bad. We walk, though. If there are shocks, I’m imagining a pleasant walk, and cannot feel them anymore, and soon, I’m back in the school, still a ghost. Or again.

It’s a comforting delusion, at any rate. There’s Monsters to fight, like before I was locked up. But these monsters have names, and can be resisted. Not like before. There was no before Archie. Tell me about the Phallus monsters, Archie. These carrots. I have a job to do. After so long in the Sanitarium being healed, I’m whole You believe this? I think your mind is still broken Archie. If you’re healed and whole, then who are you talking to? It doesn’t matter. I have a job to do.

I just don’t know what it is, or how to do it. But it beats Group Therapy, alone in a room full of the ghosts of my friends. Now you’re in a room of ghosts of strangers. How is this better?